Hub Staff

It was the 8th annual cleanup at Port Elgin Beach on the afternoon of Wednesday, September 23, part of The Great Canadian Shoreline Cleanup by The Planeteers, a Saugeen District Secondary School environmental action group.

Along with the SDSS students and teachers, community members and Town of Saugeen Shores staff also helped out with the clean up. The Town of Saugeen Shores provided garbage bags and gloves for the volunteers.

The Great Canadian Shoreline Cleanup is one of the largest environmental events in Canada, the third largest cleanup in the world; and raises awareness to the public to better understand how shoreline litter adversely affects both aquatic life as well as people.

Nancie Darlington-Smith of The Planeteers said The Great Canadian Shoreline Cleanup is a Vancouver initiative that SDSS with their Planteers grasped onto.

“The Planeteers have found this yearly beach cleanup event in Port Elgin to be a great way to give back to their community and keep it healthy for years to come,” she said.

Darlington-Smith who teaches physical geography at the school said that they clean up anything they find that is not part of the eco-system and then log what they find to study shoreline processes.

“There's different hot spots. The dune grass is great at trapping sand and it's also pretty good at grabbing some litter before it takes off and away,” she said. “Single use food wrappers are the number one thing Canada wide that are picked up and cigarette butts are number two.”

Darlington-Smith added that logging the different types of garbage gives them an overall health picture. “You want to know what's washing up on your shores or what people are leaving here that will wash up on your shores elsewhere,” she said.

The total collected within an hour included 1,180 cigarette butts, 315 food wrappers, 301 plastic pieces, 68 bottle caps and numerous other items.